Where to begin when documenting the life of an icon? With an anecdote, conveying the reverence he once commanded. It was a morning in 1950 in Cape Cod, Mass., when a local policeman so enamored of Ted Williams, the Boston Red Sox superstar, practically begs one of the player's newfound friends if he can have the privilege of sitting inside the player's Cadillac.

That's the magnetism and aura Williams had throughout his life, and it is what veteran Sports Illustrated writer Leigh Montville effectively and exhaustively conveys in "Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero."

With a catalog of colorful stories – some hilarious, others heartbreaking – collected from interviews with hundreds of people who knew him well, this may be the definitive work on Williams. He was one of the world's most gifted men at the plate with a baseball bat, on the river with fishing rod and in the skies flying a fighter plane.

Montville confesses in the epilogue of his 500-plus-page treatise that the late Williams was his boyhood idol, yet he does not sugarcoat his treatment. The result is an engaging, fascinating read that could interest generations of readers, from those fortunate enough to have watched the baseball Hall of Famer play from 1939 to 1960 (his career was interrupted from 1943-45 and he missed the bulk of the 1952 and 1953 seasons because of military service) to younger fans who missed out.

However, if you don't have intimate knowledge of America's national pastime, or haven't ever picked up a fishing rod or been around a tackle box, you might easily feel left behind on the odyssey from San Diego to Boston and Minnesota, to Korea, Canada, Russia and ultimately to Florida, where Williams died two years ago amid family squabbling, put to rest by his now-deceased son, John-Henry, in a manner many found macabre and bizarre.

The story of "The Splendid Splinter" begins in a place very familiar to San Diegans – North Park, where Williams was born to a Mexican-American mother and Anglo father. Montville takes the reader down El Cajon Boulevard to Herbert Hoover High School, which Williams attended, and down to the waterfront in the 1930s, to old Lane Field, when Williams was turning heads with his hitting for the San Diego Padres of the Pacific Coast League.

The chapter devoted to San Diego is essential to understanding the events that formed Williams's psyche: his disdain for his mother May's proselytizing as a Salvation Army volunteer; his resentment at lack of attention from her and from his father; and his penchant for perfection in hitting a baseball, which he obsessed over with his coaches and eventually made into an art form.

One could make a reasonable argument that, in the title of the book, "Icon" would have been more accurate than "Hero." Through resurrecting news stories and conversations Williams had with people who knew him intimately, Montville shows the Boston Red Sox prodigy to have been an incredibly complex man of contrasts and contradictions.

One minute, the man who made No. 9 famous was foulmouthed and immature, prone to spitting at and flipping off fans who booed him for his errors in the outfield, and berating friends who annoyed him.

The next, he was the consummate Good Samaritan, who away from the diamond soothed dying children in their hospital beds and promised the gifts of home runs dedicated to them. At times he was a loner, and at others a socialite with the charismatic power to command and charm a room with his booming voice.

Williams frequently cursed at a god he claimed not to believe in, yet is described by at least one friend as one of the most spiritual people he ever met. While he comforted other children, he remained aloof toward, and largely absent in, the lives of the three he fathered, by different wives.

In his baseball career, he was a lifetime .344 hitter (including a .406 average in 1941 that has since been approached only twice), a 17-time all-star and a two-time Most Valuable Player, but journalists such as Boston Record columnist Dave Egan, with whom Williams frequently feuded, assailed him for his poor showing in the 1946 World Series, mediocre defensive skills and perceived
me-first attitude.

"In the first game, sixth inning, Williams dropped a soft fly behind short – yelling 'Mine,' before he dropped it. The fans in left booed. Hy Hurwitz in the Globe reported that Williams 'raised his two forefingers skyward to let the fans know how he felt about them.' In the second game Williams misplayed Vic Wertz's single to left with the bases loaded, and all three runners scored, Wertz ending on third. The boos increased and followed Williams toward the dugout at the end of the inning.

" 'I don't mind the errors,' Williams told reporters after the game, 'but those – – fans; they can – – – and you can quote me in all the papers. They're – – .' "

Williams was described as anything but selfish when he was a fighter pilot in the Korean War, in which he was part of a cadre of pilots that included former New York Yankee player and current Padres announcer Jerry Coleman. Montville skillfully pieces together details from interviews to retell a harrowing incident in which Williams barely escaped with his life after his plane was shot up by enemy fighters and crash-landed at an air base.

Incredibly, Williams would return to Boston's Fenway Park in 1953 and continue his prodigious hitting: .407, with 13 home runs in 37 games. It was only injury that slowed him at age 41 and forced him into retirement after the 1960 season – after he belted 29 homers and hit .316.

Williams was, as Montville writes, also a man of surprises.

As gruff as he often was, he went out of his way to befriend Pumpsie Green, the Red Sox's first African-American player. At Williams' Hall of Fame induction speech, he took the bold, unprecedented step of lauding the efforts of superstar Negro League players and lobbied for their inclusion at the Cooperstown shrine. He expressed regret at not having been able to compete against them because the racism of the day forbade it.

As legendary a player as Williams was, in many ways his real life – or at least a second career – began after baseball, with the years he devoted to his life as a sportsman, hunting and fishing in all corners of the world. At times, Montville goes into far too much detail about the nuances of fishing and the lives of the friends of Williams' friends, but nevertheless comes up with a few interesting yarns.

In that life off the diamond, though, demons from the
ever-cantankerous Williams' childhood reappeared. Though not entirely of his own doing, what had been an illustrious life turned sordid. As he pursued the outdoor life, he became an absentee husband to three wives, and estranged father to his two daughters and son – as his own father had been to him.

Williams' son John-Henry (who died only months ago of leukemia) is portrayed as a ruthless, conniving yet inept businessman who turned his father into a cash cow as his health deteriorated, forcing him to sign memorabilia to line his pockets. Unfortunately, readers get little of John-Henry's side, through fleeting comments from his attorney.

What registers, though, is a picture of Williams dying while his offspring bicker over their inheritance and, strangely, what to do with his body. Montville's sources suggest that Williams wanted his body to be cremated and his ashes spread at sea, not trusted to a cryonics lab in the Arizona desert.

Montville ends his encyclopedic treatment of Williams, the icon, with a short comment in the language and style of his boyhood idol:
"The body of the famous man might be frozen in some goddamned, clapped-up, syphilitic (bleepin') steel can, but his life is frozen in memory and daydream, recollection and tall tale. He did not hesitate often on his walk across the American landscape."